


TPP Timeline 2020

by mitzirocker



Category: Twitch Plays Pokemon (Let's Play)
Genre: Multi, more like a plot summary tbh
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-14
Updated: 2020-06-14
Packaged: 2021-03-04 01:13:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,913
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24725080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mitzirocker/pseuds/mitzirocker
Summary: My TPP timeline, circa the end of the Gauntlet.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 7





	1. Introduction

**Author's Note:**

> I first meant to stick this at the end of my Gauntlet lore collection, like, as context, but then it kinda got away with me, so I scrapped it, started again, and it still ended up way longer than I was expecting. Done in prose because endless rambling is my preferred art form.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lemme get some stuff outta the way.

There’s no way I could possibly fit every single game ever played on stream into my timeline, so I have specific rules on what runs count for my purposes. If it’s a main series Pokémon game played as a full run, gets added to the run counter and everything, it happened in a manner recognisable as what happened on stream, and the Voices were very involved. If it’s a main series Pokémon game played as a PBR sidegame, it also happened, but probably in a less recognisable form and almost certainly without the Voices getting involved. Everything else… Some of it I do use, like, I think Conquest happened, but it doesn’t go on the timeline, and the Voices weren’t involved.

My take on TPP is structured like a very long, very weird endless shounen fight manga. Runs are grouped into larger arcs, and these arcs are in turn all part of a larger meta-arc that covers all of TPP. Arcs are generally about one specific thing, usually but not always a bad guy, and build up and climax to tell their own story. Not everything important in an arc happens while the Voices are there, but the Voices always show up for the final battle or whatever.

I’m vaguely working by Homestuck timeline physics here, so each separate universe doesn’t relate temporally to the others. Kind of. I’ve done a lot of finagling. There’s enough dimension hopping in this that [you’ll probably need a map](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/461290476054773790/721009220736254092/timeline_layout.png). Within timelines, runs generally happen in chronological order when reality isn’t collapsing.

Before the Voices show up, the pokéverse that will become the TPPverse is fairly standard. Tiny towns, vast wilderness, low-scale technology, low-key atmosphere… It’s at roughly the same tone as Adventures, maybe a bit lighter, and it uses a pretty upbeat version of my unnecessarily dark pokéverse headcanons. A hint of danger beneath the surface, maybe, but for the most part a gentle and happy existence. The kind of place where you can leave home at ten to go backpacking alone across a region filled with monsters, and it’s still somehow a childish whimsical journey. Then the Voices show up and ruin everything.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'd recommend keeping that map open in a tab. Things are gonna get Homestuck-y.


	2. Helix Arc

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Timeline: OT Mark 1
> 
> Runs: Red, Crystal
> 
> Timespan: Around five years
> 
> Tone: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

The Voices are a chaotic stupid extradimensional mind hive of dubious origin and limited competence. Before they reached Red, they’d apparently been wandering from pokéverse to pokéverse, possessing children, hijacking their pokémon journeys, and absorbing the kids into the mind hive, like you do. I say ‘apparently’ because the Voices that crash into Red’s head one February morning had basically no memories of what they were and where they’d been. All they know is what they need to do.

Oak’s parcel, Viridian Forest, Pewter City, Brock, Mt. Moon… The Voices could do this without thinking, which is good because the Voices aren’t doing much thinking. They’re not really cognisant of themselves as a unit, or anything, really, especially not the ten-year-old trapped inside his own mind in an endless overpowering ocean of churning, shrieking noise that slowly erodes his very sense of self. There’s no sign this journey is going to be any different to the Voices’ last hundred thousand, but then they find Helix.

Helix is… I have a lot of fossil god headcanons and a very in-depth pre-humanity backstory for them. Suffice to say that Helix has been trapped inside its anchor-fossil for sixty-five million years, imprisoned in nothingness, completely alone. Its mental state is about as bad as Red’s when the Voices find its fossil. Maybe that’s why they latch onto each other so hard. Red is the first thing Helix has felt outside itself in eons, and Helix is the one thing that can bypass the Voices to reach Red. Trapped in their respective prisons, they metaphorically hold each other’s metaphorical hands, waiting to be freed.

Helix gets out first. In the Cinnabar Island labs, what was supposed to be an ordinary ancient pokémon genome sequencing gets hijacked by the Voices, who use their bullshit omnipotence – oh yeah, they’re omnipotent – to open a hole in the seal and free the thing they can tell is inside. Because :insert overly complicated technobabble here: this also breaks all the other seals on all the other fossil gods, and since I go for a very Lovecraftian read on them this immediately kicks off the end of the world. Not that Red notices, or cares. Helix has been keeping Red from being absorbed into the mind hive since they met, but now Red is free from the pull of that sucking black hole once and for all. All that remains is to get him out.

That doesn’t happen to the Hall of Fame. Helix is weakened and discombobulated enough that any attempt to just pull him out of the Voices would lead to a tug of war that would almost certainly rip Red apart. At the Hall of Fame, though, for the first time in a while, the Voices aren’t sure what to do next. Complete the dex? Find Mewtwo? In their indecision, Helix reaches into the mind hive, snatches up Red, and yoinks him out. He’s still connected to the Voices, but outside the mind hive those connections are obvious enough Helix (well, Redhelix at this point) can burn them away. Then it blasts all the bits of the Voices that connected to Red so hard they break completely. Injured, confused, the Voices drop Red’s body, and he becomes the first kid in so, so long to leave the Voices.

With the vague sense that that wasn’t supposed to happen, the Voices head out of this pokéverse the same way they came in. However, they’re stopped. Finding out who or what by would require getting a straight answer from the Voices, so why remains a mystery. All anyone knows is, the next time the Voices appear, it’s three years later and everything is on fire.

In Crystal, the world around AJ is as loud and chaotic and screamy as the inside of his head. AJ’s Johto is absolutely trashed, what with the Cult of Helix and like a hundred natural disasters and constant pokémon rampages. The Cult of Helix, for the record, is a batshit crazy apocalypse cult that does human and pokémon sacrifice and openly wants the end of the world. More so than it’s already ended, at any rate. And it just keeps getting worse. The very fabric of reality is awake now, and everything’s taken a level in extra.

Still, there are (admittedly absolutely tiny) bright spots. AJ’s still overwhelmed by the Voices, but he’s never sucked into them. He’s always aware of who he is and where he came from, always separate from the mind hive. He’s able to connect with his pokémon a little, and he even makes a human friend. It’s not the Voices that cause him to snap, it’s seeing a pokémon he raised from an egg be torn apart by Helix cultists during the Battle of Olivine. AJ kind of completely loses his shit after that, and swears to destroy the gods, all of them. The Voices don’t quite notice the source of this impulse, but they still get swept up in AJ’s fervour and carve a bloody swathe across Johto.

Once he’s cleared the Cult of Helix out of Johto, AJ goes to Kanto, which is somehow even more than a wreck. After he’s scoured through the ruins of enough once-great cities, AJ catches wind that the big boss of the Cult is on Mt. Silver. He already knows it’s Red, because he’s listened to a loooot of Helixian propaganda this past year. The only question is, which Red?

The Voices are still hazy enough that they can’t tell if they’ve jumped universes or not. Johto’s not supposed to go like this, they’re reasonably sure, but have they just landed somewhere weird or is this Helix the same Helix? The memories of their last journey, especially the end of it, are clearer than they usually are, they know somehow. The Blue they met in the ruins of Cinnabar looked familiar, though they can’t say how. The Voices are still turning this over in their collective mindscape as they and AJ scale Mt. Silver.

Atop Mt. Silver, Red and Helix are preparing a ritual that will destroy the world. Red, as mentioned before, was already thoroughly insane before he hitched up with the local Cthulhoid god of chaos. His skin is covered in ritual spiral scars, and his eyes are unusable husks because the Voices never bothered to blink. Since he was freed from the Voices, he’s covered up his fear with all-consuming hate. He hates the world he lives in too, how it just went on like everything was okay while he was breaking every bone in his body and screaming his life out in the back of his mind. (Helix thinks the entire Kanto region basically not noticing a kid who kept walking into walls and falling off ledges was the Voices’ fault. Red doesn’t care.) All of it needs to be cleansed. All of it needs to be swept away.

There’s very little out there that can fight through all the barriers Red and Helix set up around the ritual site, but the Voices are one of the few exceptions. Red knows they’re climbing the mountain long before AJ stumbles out of the Mt. Silver cave system, sword in hand, eyes shining purple. His pokémon by his side, Red strides through the snow to meet them, pokémon at his side, spirals rippling through the air around him. AJ sees him, and sends his mon in for the kill. The Voices…

For the first time ever, the Voices look on a face that used to be theirs. For the first time ever, the Voices notice how different AJ’s feelings are from their own. For all they did to him, they were attached to the idea of Red in their own slipshod way. Seeing him like this, blood dripping from his hands, face covered in scars, soul burning with hate, they can’t help but wonder what happened to this kid they used to be. If he’s something separate from them, then what about-

The Voices are shocked out of their incipient existential crisis when Helix stabs at them and they remember, oh yeah, massive god battle. They win the fight, eventually, and Lazergator’s finishing blow does _something_ to Helix that makes it scream and writhe and then suddenly completely vanish. Red crumples up and collapses to the ground. AJ nearly does the same, but Lazergator catches him. At some point between his victory call to Joey and Blue’s pidgeot landing on top of the mountain, the Voices disappear.

The Helix arc is the darkest arc of TPP. Its world is full of vast unending nightmares, and the most you can do is find someone to cling to. Even after the Voices do whatever they did to Helix, Kanto and Johto are still destroyed, everyone within a hundred miles of Hoenn has still lost their minds, Sinnoh is still a smoking crater, all the younger fossil gods are still out there, and all over the world, newly-formed evil teams and the worst kind of legendaries are wreaking havoc. There are no heroes here, only screaming children tearing themselves and each other apart in the dark. The end of the world has come, and all is lost.

Which is why a certain person took a great risk to save his daughter and the world.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It gets less edgy from here, I promise.

**Author's Note:**

> I could probably expound on every detail in this for multiple hours. The things I can't, I can't wait to fill in. TPP has been my passion to an embarrassing degree since 2015, and I will never ever shut up about it.


End file.
